artp’s Techdirt Comments

Re: Re: Garbage in, garbage out

There's a lot of wannabes out there who haven't gotten that message.

I know that the norm today is to let all the garbage through because we might stifle somebody's expression. I prefer community standards. Communities are dying out, and communities have standards. Gangsta rap is an almost-community that we don't need. Of course, I have trouble with free speech for hate groups. That's not really another issue, because gangsta rap is about hate. And that is hearsay because I'm sure not going to torture myself with listening to the stuff.

Garbage in, garbage out

If you fill your head with something long enough, you will become affected. If you fill your head with violence long enough, you will become more violent than you were. The results will vary for different people. It may erupt into action. Or maybe you were screwed up before you started filling your head. This is just revealing the environment that the person was living in. And it wouldn't take this much to put a[n alleged] terrorist behind bars.

Gangsta rap has no socially redeeming values. It is filled with misogny, hate crimes and general mayhem. Just because we can. We already have far too much violence.

If nothing else, maybe allowing this in court will help stamp out some bad music? Too bad we didn't have this option for disco.

Yes, this will cost farmers money

Every time a new innovation comes along, it is trumpeted as crating more income for farmers. And that is true - for about two or three years. Then the suppliers (seeds, equipment, chemicals) and buyers (meat packing, grain exporters, food processors) catch on to exactly how much more/less they can charge/pay farmers without driving them out of business.

With more data, Monsanto doesn't have to wait that extra two or three years. They can hit the ground running, and squeeze every possible penny out of farmers. They can also squeeze extra money out the rest of the time, too. Regional pricing, as Glyn points out, is an anticompetitive strategy.

This would not be possible without the commoditization of agriculture that was kicked off by Earl Butz in the Nixon administration. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Until farmers recreate an actual; farm economy and start adding value to their products AND give consumers what they want, this will continue. Sound like Masnick's Connect with Fans strategy? Right now, the strategy of agriculture is to conform to Big Ag's demands and fight what consumers want. Kinda backwards if you ask me.

New capabilities

I gave my daughter a CD for Christmas. It had some songs with her name in the title, and then I cheated and included a couple of songs from a new artist that I thought she'd like that had her same first name.

Long, long ago, it cost real money to do something like that. Money that would have been way out of my league. But today, I just got on Amazon, some lyrics sites and Google, searched out some songs with her name in them, bought the individual MP3s for her (and me), packaged them up in a CD, then bought the MP3s on Christmas Eve, with an email showing up in her inbox with instructions on how to access them from anywhere.

Not surprising

Print media all over the world are having financial difficulties. These guys just have to charge more to cover their expenses. Unlike the other print media, though, they have a captive audience.

This is especially ironic in the age of the Web, where publishing distribution has almost a zero cost, even while publishing markup and preparation costs have dropped, and the incremental cost is approaching zero. Open standards for publishing markup would drive that to zero immediately.

I am always glad when I see more news about researchers developing their own publishing network at drastically lower costs. We should have something like ibiblio or gutenburg for researchers Real Soon Now.

When did awareness of the new Big Three change?

It used to be the USA, the Soviet Union and China. Since the Soviets took a nosedive in 1989, two new powers crept in as the USA also became a puppet. [We lost our focus because we didn't know who our enemies were any more. Really, Nixon making nice with the Chinese started it, but it accelerated after the corporate terrorists took over.]

So now we have China, corporate terrorists and third world terrorists.

When did people start recognizing the threat from the corporate world? I've been beating that drum since at least the 90s.

Re: That's what the law already says

The manufacturer is supposed to document the design, manufacture and installation of the process that creates the product. They are also supposed to document operations.

Specifically, the documentation shall be sufficient by itself, with no other help, to recreate the manufacturing process that makes the product. Results must be reproducible and identical between original and duplicate systems.

Somehow they have forgotten that. Now, they are not the only ones with their fingers in the cookie jar. Congress has exempted certain products (COUGH GMOs COUGH) from going through the entire validation process.

But, if the FDA had bothered to ask, I would have been glad to tell them, "You have corrupted your mission and are now working against your original charter! We need another Upton Sinclair to get people riled enough to want to do something about the state of the food production systems."

The sad part is that the FDA actually DOES enforce their regs sometimes. They have taken over QA activities from several pharmaceutical manufacturers. And we still have a problem. That should tell you how big a problem we have.

Unfortunately, I don't see a lot of interest in the US public for getting riled about anything but pro sports and movie stars.

Might as well put "1984" in your tagline, Winston

I'm tired of having to type it in every time something like this comes up. And to think that this was presented as pure fantasy when I first read the book, even though J. Edgar Hoover was operating in this mode without our knowledge - yet.

The problem with letting the government run our lives is that they keep proving that they can't run their own lives. One outcome of increased spying is that DHS departments will be playing God with people's lives even more.

I keep trying to decide which is worse: a pre-adolescent child being sexually abused by its mother's boyfriend, or spreading the same work out across several foster homes, with perhaps a shallow grave at the end of each one?

At least with the abuse confined to one place, that spark of hope can still survive. Spreading it around could totally extinguish it. The only advantage to keeping the government out is that it lets the family in, for better or worse.

Thank God that my great-grandmother rescued my mother and her siblings from a dangerous situation without the government preventing her from helping. It isn't legal to have family these days, but then, it's now illegal to grow up the way I did.

Re:

Even worse.

If all they had to put into a court opinion of that magnitude was concerning an ongoing investigation, it kind of tips you off that they don't have any real results from completed investigations, now doesn't it?

Makes we want to move to Bulgaria, where they can't afford this kind of insanity. Good old fashioned rifle butts, that's the ticket!

We can't let the nation down.

That sounds sooo patriotic.

So, we can't let the nation down.But we have to violate all the principles that this nation is founded on in order to not let the nation down.Then it isn't the nation that we have pledged to protect anymore.So we aren't letting the nation down by not collecting metadata or any other half-cocked scheme that is being used.So we don't have to do those half-cocked schemes.